Someone please plug the space expert to international conflict expert pipeline
Hello friends,
A brief note: if this is the first time you’re receiving my newsletter, welcome! I just transferred over a bunch of contacts, so believe it or not, you did actually want to be in touch. This newsletter is very infrequent and typically contains life and work updates— if you want more than that, I have a Patreon, and if you want less, please feel free to unsubscribe.
I had planned this week to update everyone on some new speaking and values workshops I’m running in March, but instead want to take a moment to provide a roundup of some cool-headed takes on how the invasion of Ukraine by Russia affects a longstanding site of US-Russian diplomacy: space.
To be clear: for the most part, my eyes are not on the International Space Station, they are on people on the ground in Ukraine, and those in Russia who are protesting the war. Wars are not fought by the powerful and wealthy who wage them, and the destruction they bring most impacts those who were vulnerable before the crisis. Frankly, space diplomacy is a very small and well-cushioned corner of this conflict— not entirely insignificant, but not the center of my attention.
However, much of my work is on space exploration and its social contexts, and I do see something happening in that domain that I’d like to perhaps caution us away from. In the past few days I’ve been dismayed to see other folks in space science and industry speculating on social media about the impacts of the conflict on the space program. Some of that speculation is natural, because the US and Russia have a longstanding cooperative relationship in space, including Russian cosmonauts and US astronauts working together on the International Space Station. Up until very recently, the US was completely reliant on Russia for ferrying people into space, and there’s also recently been a plan for crew swaps (cosmonauts going to space on US vehicles, and vice versa). In addition, components of the Antares rocket are manufactured in Ukraine, and use of Russian rockets is planned for upcoming European space missions like ExoMars.
Dmitri Rogozin, Russia’s space chief, is also not making things much better with his own spicy takes (here’s a translation of Rogozin’s recent thread, via Eric Berger of Ars Technica), like threatening to have the Russian module of the ISS stop providing orbital corrections and thus de-orbiting the entire space station. Let me give you the takeaway up front: the Russian and US parts of the ISS are attached to one another, and in order for that threat to come true, cosmonauts would have to go against longstanding relationships built on a trust central to survival in space in order to destroy something they have worked their whole lives towards, which would also kill them in the process. If you’d like to better understand the working relationship between the US and Russia in space, there’s a great, level-headed thread detailing the relationship aboard the International Space Station by the ISS Editor for @NASASpaceflight here, and an excellent article by Loren Grush for the Verge here. It’s not that the conflict doesn’t make things more tense (because how could it not), but let’s not get carried away. It’s Twitter— even Russian space chiefs go there to yell.
As the conflict has evolved over the past several days, I also see space experts speculating about the destruction of various cities and facilities in Ukraine. Again, people are doing this because they are monitoring manufacturing facilities for various rocket parts, and here I will refrain from saying what I think if your focus is on rocket parts in this conflict. More serious though is the lack of recognition that wars are not only fought physically, but in the information space. If the past several years have taught us nothing else, it’s that social media has been weaponized in the service of disinformation. For example, a widely circulated photo this week of a bombing "in Ukraine" is actually of an Israeli bombing of Palestinians in Gaza from 2021, and disinformation researcher Abbie Richards has also pointed out how the use of older audio on platforms like TikTok is being used to imply that users are in the middle of action, when they are not.
I don’t think that folks in space science who are speculating about military targets or publicly fretting about Russia de-orbiting the ISS etc think of themselves as contributing to an intentionally confusing, noisy information space, but they are. Disinformation loves social media, the way it accelerates and amplifies opinions presented like facts. What we can and should do is to bring our attentions to the Ukrainian people, speak out against imperialism in all its forms, and be extremely circumspect about what information we choose to share on websites and apps that have only ever been made to manipulate us.
In solidarity to the stars,
Lucianne